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The accomplished stories found in this book take the reader from Cuba to the Yukon, from a parched landscape in Canada to the cool streets of southern Spain, from Toronto to the Rockies, and from the narrowing world of the dying to the wondrous expanse of a child's imagination. Uncannily adept at transporting his audience, Wade Bell's collection offers a satisfying depth of experience.

Bellecour is about a man's metaphysical return to a series of enigmatic sexual moments that occurred when he was nine years old in the Paris of 1963. This journey blurs the physical lines between present and past, between Toronto and Paris, and ultimately between sexual awakening and sexual abuse.

Leonard Edison's wife has a dark and frightening premonition - that her husband will die before his next birthday. Leonard, aware of this forecast, responds with the animal instinct of fight-or-flight - he wings away on an affair with a former student, engages in a series of petty crimes, neglects his dying mother, moves in with his strange, disaffected nephew (who is living off the spoils of a lottery win) and even flirts with the shadowy Toronto Goth world.

A Latino bar in Toronto, 1978. The men can't take their eyes off Lisa, but there is something about her that scares them off. She is a little too intense, a little too needy. Don, a realtor with a murky South American past, is unfazed. He listens patiently when Lisa tells him she is looking for her father, a wealthy man living in Argentina. Or so she says. Determined to find her roots, Lisa goes to Argentina. It's a journey born of longing for love and the desperate need for something solid to hold on to. Don offers to come along.

From celebrated Toronto poet, Domenico Capilongo, comes a collection of powerful and humorous stories inspired by love: the love of family and tradition, the passion shared between two people when love is found, and the impact felt when it is misunderstood and lost. These stories travel the globe from Toronto to Vancouver, WWII Sicily, Rome, Japan, Thailand, and even the gardens of Paris. Capilongo succeeds in capturing the beat of relationships in their many stages of complicated development.

The game of life. Stories about competition in sports and games and activities. The Greek conception of the agon, competitive tests of skill and endurance and fortitude – and experiencing what an old TV show once called the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. There is more, however, than the pleasure of a score and the pain of a loss. More than the outcome of the competition is what the competition reveals about character. And, though all playing involves fun and skill and struggle, there is the game that leads to the short-term outcome and there is the game that is without end.

The resistance of the human spirit in face of time, disloyalty, and oblivion is the theme of Marina Sonkina’s new collection of short stories. Her seemingly naïve and helpless protagonists inhabit disparate social stations, geographical locales and cultures; all are persons displaced in their own lives. But in their struggles for survival, they discover the redeeming and dangerous power of unconditional love – the only weapon available to them. Strange and incomprehensible to everyone, love makes its sudden appearance to an eight-year-old hunchbacked boy in the title story of Lucia’s Eyes.

Images overrun the world. Toons filled with rage and hate hunger for life. A war between simulations and humans. People besieged in a castle of dreams. A mysterious knight shifts between worlds, holding the secret that could save all. Orphaned children lead him to the whirlwind, the terrible faceless source. B.W. Powe's stunning fable erases the lines between illusion and reality. Visionary, poet, novelist, essayist, B.W.

With their staccato rhythm and attention to detail these stories recall emotions, memories, atmosphere, and even physical sensations with a powerful freshness. Gasparini's ability to render passion and humanity ensure a truly memorable and compelling collection.

In this novel from a Quebecois feminist writer, a shy sixteen-year-old falls in love with a classmate while attending a Catholic boarding school for prospective schoolteachers. When the fantasized relationship fails she takes superficial refuge with a group of girls recognizing her own loneliness and that of the group.